


A Fool Unto Himself

by Decepticonsensual



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Xenophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-22 18:08:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13769667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Decepticonsensual/pseuds/Decepticonsensual
Summary: He's not the Winter Soldier anymore, but Bucky Barnes is a dangerous man.  Too dangerous to be allowed to go free.  Bucky can't stand the thought of hurting someone else.  Steve, though, can't take the idea of putting him back on ice.Then salvation comes from an unexpected direction:  The Guardians of the Galaxy are prepared to offer Bucky a chance to explore the universe as one of them.  And you can't say they don't have experience keeping bloodthirsty, cybernetically altered warriors in line.In fact, one of those cybernetic warriors has a pretty good idea what Bucky's going through... and they might just end up being able to save one another.It's just your classic love story of mindwiped assassin meets trigger-happy space raccoon at the edge of the universe.





	1. Only To Find Gideon's Bible

**Author's Note:**

> For ABucketofProtons - thank you for feeding my interest in raccoonshipping! :D
> 
> Warnings for relatively graphic depictions of violence and injury; depictions of PTSD; and some cross-species canoodling. Set shortly after Captain America: Civil War. This story is primarily based on the MCU, but a couple of little details are taken from the comics - most notably the Guardians' penchant for RPGs, and the fact that Tony Stark previously lived and fought beside them for a few months and bonded with Rocket (and yes, Rocket is as condescending about Tony's tech in the comics as he is here :)).

_Three._

 

Bucky Barnes held his breath.

 

_Two._

 

_One -_

 

And the world exploded.

 

And out of the flames flew a faintly singed ball of grey-and-black fur, propelled on the backdraft of the fireball.

 

Bucky sprang into a run, catching Rocket around the middle and letting their combined momentum bear them up and over the ruins of the wall, crouching behind it as flames splashed against the other side. He made to wrap himself protectively around Rocket, but found that his arms were empty. Instead, sharp claws were digging into his skin as Rocket scampered onto his shoulder, leaning over to tug a couple of guns that looked like they came out of a pulp comic from the bag he’d brought with him.

 

Bucky wrinkled his nose. Burnt hair was never a pleasant smell, but burnt _fur_ was even more intrusive.

 

“Here. This one’s only on half charge, though, so careful how you use your shots,” Rocket instructed, dropping the lighter of the two guns into Bucky’s hands.

 

Bucky risked a glance over the top of the wall, cocked the gun, and murmured, “I hate your date ideas.”

  
  
  
***

 

_Three months earlier_

 

 

One thing Bucky Barnes knew in his bones, even before he was able to recall why: Soldiers were always the same, through the decades, across the world.

 

And now, it seemed, across the galaxy, as well.

 

Bucky swept his gaze over the three figures in front of him.

 

The two with green skin were clearly soldiers: it was written into the lines of their bodies, the motion of their eyes as they assessed him for weak points. He wondered if their species were all warriors. (Later, he would be ashamed of the question, the absurd idea that an entire alien world could be reduced to a single trait, the ignorance of assuming that they came from the same world in the first place because of the colour of their skin.)

 

He carefully settled his weight back on his heels, and crossed his arms, before giving them a deliberate nod. There was a pause, the length of a breath – and then, as he’d hoped, they relaxed in response. The man (did aliens have genders?) folded his arms as well, and offered a noncommittal grunt, while the woman eased her hands fractionally down, and away from where they’d been hovering over the holsters at her hips.

 

The third stranger, meanwhile, for all that he carried himself more like a showman than a soldier, had been watching this silent exchange with sharp eyes. Now he grinned and stepped forward, hand outstretched.

 

“Peter Quill.” As he clasped Bucky’s hand, Quill’s smile softened, shading into something almost intimate. His warm grip lingered, and he leaned in, voice low. “But you probably know me as… Star-Lord.”

 

“I can guarantee you he doesn’t, Quill,” came a voice from behind Bucky.

 

“Awww, come on, Stark!” Quill howled, but his grin widened and he bounded past Bucky to wrap Tony Stark in a hug. “I saved the galaxy how many times now, and you’re telling me my fame hasn’t spread far and wide back on Terra? Thought there’d be a statue of me somewhere.”

 

“And here I thought your natural modesty would make you shun fame and fortune.”

 

Stark’s eyes were hidden behind designer sunglasses, but there was something about his tone that struck Bucky’s ear as… strange. He’d managed to avoid a direct conversation with the man since Stark had shown up in Wakanda, at Steve’s invitation, but he was more than familiar with Stark’s voice nevertheless – the short phrases bitten out in team debates, the rants to Steve or Black Widow when they didn’t think they would be overheard. Stark’s voice had always been jagged and icy, speaking either too little or far too much, building in volume as if he couldn’t rein it in. Now, there was a note in it that was almost akin to warmth.

 

It cooled immediately, though, as Stark continued, “Quill, this is the Winter Soldier.”

 

“Barnes,” Bucky added softly, not exactly a correction. “James Buchanan.”

 

“Yeah, we’ve heard about you!” Bucky winced, but there was no edge to Quill’s voice as he simply rolled right on. “So! Stark tells me you’re going to be joining the greatest heroes in the galaxy.”

 

“No, I said he’s going to be joining _you_ assholes.” Stark favoured Quill with a shit-eating grin as he said it, and Quill chuckled – but his attention returned quickly to Bucky. Bucky looked into the welcoming smile, the big blue eyes that seemed to radiate _I don’t know you yet, but I already believe in you._ It all reminded him abruptly of Steve, and he couldn’t stand it.

 

“Not my choice,” he said, then winced as the words came out brusque and too loud. “Sorry – no offense meant. I appreciate the invitation. But if I had my way, I’d still be in cryo-freeze back in Wakanda. I got – outvoted.”

 

_Black Widow talked a lot about failsafes, and Hawkeye kept saying he trusted me, like that didn’t make it worse, and Wanda took the whole thing personal, as if anyone were going to look at the kid who made one mistake like they look at the guy with a seventy-year history of political murder. And Vision kept spouting percentages, and Stark wouldn’t look at me at all, and Sam said he didn’t risk his neck to bring me back just so I could be locked away again somewhere. And Steve -_

 

_And Stevie wouldn’t budge, the stubborn little punk, but that’s not what did it. It was the look on his face whenever he glanced my way, when he thought I didn’t see. Like if I went back into the deep freeze, he was gonna break._

 

Quill’s expression said that wasn’t entirely a surprise. Bucky wondered, not for the first time, exactly what Stark and the others had told these Guardians of the Galaxy about who – what – they were taking on.

 

 _Somewhere you’ll be safe while you sort things out in your head,_ Sam had said to him.

 

 _Somewhere that will be safe from me,_ Bucky had all but begged.

 

Stark broke the uncomfortable silence. “Where’s the rest of the merry band, anyway?”

 

“Groot had a bad brush with some Badoon last week, he’s still in his pot,” Quill replied, to Bucky’s mystification. “So that just leaves – oh, here we go!”

 

Bucky tried to follow Quill’s gaze, and ended up looking in just about every direction before he thought to look down. And when he did, he couldn’t help the smile spreading over his face.

 

It was the most incongruous sight: the Guardians of the Galaxy – the fighting force Steve had described to him as the Howling Commandos of Outer Space – had a pet raccoon as a mascot. What’s more, they’d somehow trained it to walk upright, and dressed it in a tiny copy of their own uniforms. It tottled towards him, its tail fluffed out, eyes wide and curious.

Bucky immediately crouched down, tilting his head. The raccoon did the same, its intelligent gaze following him.

 

Bucky cooed, “Hey there, little guy.”

 

“Hey yourself,” the raccoon replied.

 

And Bucky had to brace his hands on his knees to keep from collapsing.

 

He’d thought he was past this. In the first few weeks after he woke up – for-real woke up, not the nightmarish slide between frozen sleep and the waking dream state of the Winter Soldier – the hallucinations had been vicious. Visions, sometimes, blinding flashes of light from non-existent explosions, and sometimes waves of heat or cold or pain without a source, but the worst had always been the auditory hallucinations. The first time he’d abruptly heard a handler’s voice barking in Russian in his ear, it had been so vivid that it convinced him, for hours, that the voice was real and what he saw around him, Avengers Tower, Steve’s face, was the dream. Steve had pulled him out of it, but it had been a close thing.

 

But he’d thought that was all over, he’d thought –

 

He was fighting down a rush of nausea – the little raccoon studying him the whole time – when Stark’s voice startled him. “Barnes, meet the best engineer in the galaxy apart from yours truly.”

 

“Awww, that’s cute, Stark, you putting yourself on my level,” the raccoon commented, still watching Bucky. That bottle-brush tail thrashed back and forth, and there was a faint curl at the corner of the creature’s lip, but it stayed as still as a drawn bowstring.

 

Bucky looked around, slowly. The other Guardians were looking on in mild concern. Stark was smirking, and that, more than anything, was what convinced Bucky he wasn’t hallucinating. Not even Stark would look that pleased with himself if he were actually witnessing Bucky having a breakdown at his feet – but failing to warn Bucky that one of the team he’d be joining was a talking raccoon and then enjoying the results, _that_ sounded right about up Stark’s alley.

 

Just like that, Bucky’s world came rushing back into focus. True, a world that turned out to contain both Tony Stark and a talking raccoon was a stranger world than he’d realised even a moment ago, but both were _real,_ neither one a nightmarish shadow underlying the other.

 

He drew in a long breath, and turned back to the raccoon.

 

“Sorry about the misunderstanding.” Bucky stuck out his hand. “I’m Barnes. I promise, I’m not usually that much of an asshole.”

 

The raccoon’s eyes widened a little, and, after a moment, it reached out and clasped the offered hand in a startlingly strong grip. The underside of its paw was bare, weathered skin, with callouses on the palm that reminded Bucky faintly of snipers he’d known, during the war, and after. The top, as Bucky closed his fingers carefully around it, was all soft fur, with the barest hint of claws underneath.

 

“Rocket,” the raccoon said.

 

“Rocket actually _is_ usually an asshole, so I wouldn’t worry about it,” Quill told him casually, wandering over to clap a hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “By the way, don’t give him your arm.”

 

Bucky glanced at their clasped hands, a little alarmed.

 

“No, that’s fine, I mean don’t give him your _arm._ ” Quill nodded towards Bucky’s prosthetic. Bucky stared. Rocket sniggered. Then he raised his voice to call past Bucky:

 

“Hey, Stark! How’s the tin-can armour doin’?”

 

“Okay, first of all, I don’t have to take that from you, and second -” Stark reached out a hand. Bucky watched the little metal tendrils wrap around it, the jewel-like repulsor node resting in the centre, a gauntlet forming out of thin air. “Not bad, huh?” Rocket trotted over and took Stark’s eagerly extended hand in both of his own, dark claws tracing over the repulsor.

 

“We’re kind of an unlikely bunch, I know,” Quill murmured, watching the two engineers bent over the gauntlet – Rocket examining it minutely, Stark looking as though he was nervously awaiting approval. “But I promise, you won’t regret coming with us. Space is just – well, living back on Terra, you’ve got no idea of the stuff that’s _out_ there. I’ve seen a city in the skull of a dead god. Fought a multi-dimensional space squid last week. I won a dance-off with a guy wielding a planet-destroying superweapon, and lived to tell about it.” He turned, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “So what do you say? I get this isn’t exactly what you wanted, but -”

 

Bucky had to stop him then. He placed a hand on Quill’s arm – hating how awkward touch still felt, the thousand little calculations his mind ran through to make sure that he didn’t press too hard with the hideous strength he now possessed – and leaned in close; Quill mirrored him, those warm blue eyes fixed on his.

 

“You know I’m dangerous, right?” Bucky asked. “The last time I lost control, I ploughed through four of the best fighters on Earth without slowing down.”

 

He was speaking low enough that no one should have heard him but Quill; nevertheless, a loud, barking laugh rang across the landing pad.

 

“The best fighters on _Earth_! Aww, man, that’s rich,” Rocket called over to them.

 

Quill chuckled. “Look, I get what you’re trying to say, but you see those two? Drax -” the green-skinned man looked up, as if abruptly yanked out of his reverie - “takes apart whole alien hordes before breakfast. And Gamora? She’s the deadliest assassin _in the galaxy._ Trust me, we can cope with dangerous.”

 

His smile was warm, and a little sad, and Bucky understood – it wasn’t just _we’re like you._ There was an unspoken _we can take you down, if we have to._

Bucky managed a smile back, and tried not to think of what would happen if Quill was wrong.

 


	2. His Rival It Seems Had Broken His Dreams

There was a porthole in the quarters they assigned to Bucky, and at first, he didn’t have eyes for anything else.

 

He had never seen so many stars, not even on the clearest nights during the war, hiding out in some abandoned field far away from cities and factories. And those twinkled gently, but these shone with a cold, hard light, a thousand nails studded into the black. (Twinkling, Rocket told him, was something that only happened planetside, when starlight was filtered through an atmosphere.) That was fascinating enough, but then, watching the stars begin to _move_ – slowly at first, then stretching out into long streaks that ultimately bled together, a flood of liquid light – _that,_ Bucky couldn’t tear himself away from.

 

He took an obscure comfort in the idea that, somewhere underneath the Winter Soldier, there were flashes of the young man who had spent his last night before the war taking his best friend to marvel at Howard Stark’s World of Tomorrow.

 

For the first few days, he kept mostly to his quarters. What lured him out in the end was partly curiosity, and partly a nagging sense of duty. Soldiers were soldiers everywhere, and it didn’t feel right that everyone was taking a regular turn on watch but him.

 

The ship was unnervingly quiet as he navigated the dimly lit corridors to the bridge, where Gamora sat behind what Bucky remembered being told was the navigation console. She glanced over briefly, then turned her attention back to the screen in front of her. “Were you unable to sleep?”

 

He shrugged. There was a scrabbling noise somewhere _inside_ the nearest bank of computers, and a second later a panel popped off the front of the display and a slightly grease-smeared Rocket emerged, a pair of goggles dangling from his neck.

 

“Messin’ with your rhythms, huh?” he asked Bucky. “Stark was the same way. Nights are a little longer on the ship – I mean, they aren’t really _nights,_ whole thing’s made up, but we turn the lights down so you daytime types can get some sleep and not go crazy. But apparently our made-up days and nights are a little longer than the ones on Earth, so it fucks with your brains.”

 

“Not with yours?” Bucky found himself asking. Rocket paused and briefly bared his teeth.

 

“Where I was made, they never turned the lights off. Keeping us from going crazy wasn’t really...” He broke off, and shook himself, turning back to the panel he’d just scrambled out of. “C’mere, I need your finger.” When Bucky didn’t move, Rocket looked over at him. “What?”

 

“I’m not supposed to be giving you body parts.”  


Gamora let out a tiny sound that could almost have been strangled laughter.

 

“I’m not asking you to take it off, just -” One claw gestured impatiently at the panel. “Come over here and stick it in that relay while I get things reconnected.”

 

Warily, Bucky crouched beside Rocket and placed his fingertip across a bunch of wires, as directed. Rocket busied himself with a wrench a few feet away. As he worked, he hummed a snatch of something bluesy and slow under his breath.

 

Bucky caught himself smiling, listening to that deep, surprisingly melodic voice. Shaking himself out of his reverie, he asked, “So what does this one do?”

 

“Controls the hyper-jumps. See, thanks to the whole quantum uncertainty thing, the jump points are signposted, but -” Rocket caught a glimpse of Bucky’s face. “Okay, so you know that jump thing we did when we left Terra? When the stars went all – long?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“That’s a hyper-jump. It’s kinda like… well, you’ve got water, right? On your world.”

 

Bucky raised an eyebrow. “Yeah. Two-thirds of the planet, I think.”

 

“Okay, first of all, that’s just nuts, but second, a hyper-jump is kinda like swimming under water. You can get further, faster, because the same physical rules don’t apply, right? So, when we jump, we can move through subspace a lot faster than normal space. Only, the jumps have to be short – like the way you have to come up for air, you can’t stay under the water all the time. So we string a whole bunch of jumps together, and we’re popping from normal space to subspace and back to normal space. _This_ baby is what keeps us on course when we’re shifting that fast.”

 

A small paw tapped the side of the console affectionately.

 

Bucky nodded, turning the idea over in his mind. “So what are we coming up for? I mean, it ain’t air.”

 

Rocket paused in turning the wrench. “Huh. You know, Quill’s picked up dumber krutackers than you, I’ll give you that. Budge over, humie – no, keep your finger where it is.” A warm, fuzzy weight settled against his side, strangely comforting, as Rocket leaned in and pulled the goggles up over his eyes. “Might want to close your eyes for this part. Well, mostly we gotta stop because we’re using jump paths other people mapped out before us, so it takes a lot of short ones to get where we need to be. Also –” there was a faint whine of machinery, and bright flashes arcing against Bucky’s closed eyelids – “the ship is a piece of krutacking junk and hyperspace is hard on equipment – people, too – so we gotta take breaks to make sure we don’t shake apart. Done.” Bucky assumed the last word was a comment on their potential fate, and didn’t immediately connect it with the flashes of light stopping, until a little taloned finger poked him lightly in the temple. “You can open ‘em now.”

 

Bucky opened his eyes on a transformed console, wires woven and secured in intricate webs. At Rocket’s nod, he pulled his finger back, but stayed crouched down, just admiring the complexity of both the setup and its function. “Well, I don’t know what you consider a piece of junk, but this ship seems pretty damned swell to me.”

 

For a moment, Rocket’s ears pricked up and his eyes widened. Then he coughed and muttered, “Yeah, well, I forget how primitive human tech still is.” But he was definitely grinning as he turned away.


	3. Danny Boy, This Is A Showdown

When he had broken his conditioning – for-real broken, though even now he shied away from thinking of his freedom as _permanent_ – when he had broken it, at first, his memory was a virtual blank. There was that single memory of the pre-war days that had broken in, like the blow of a pickaxe letting in sunlight and air: a young man in a funeral suit standing on a front step. A thin shoulder warm under his hand. _To the end of the line._ Other memories followed, gradually, chipping away at the darkness. Steve at his kitchen table. Steve with newspaper tucked into his shoes. The way Steve glanced at him sideways while sketching with a pencil on a wad of rag paper, trying to catch the shape of Bucky’s jaw, muttering, “Shoot,” under his breath when the second eye turned out half a size bigger than the first.

 

(“Maybe I shoulda lost an eye in that fall instead of an arm, then you wouldn’t need to worry about gettin’ ‘em the same size,” he’d joked, in those early days afterwards, and Steve had laughed in that tight, deliberate way he used to laugh during press interviews when they were at the front, and that was somehow worse than if he’d snapped at Bucky.)

 

The memories of the war (which he still thought of as _the_ war, Bucky Barnes’s war and not the Winter Soldier’s) were slower, but they trickled back. Some of the most vivid were not the memories of combat. If anything, it was often the battles that blended together, one shuddering filmstrip of noise and light and _pain_ ; meanwhile, single moments in between stood out in exquisite detail. Those occasional nights in London as they waited to be redeployed, for example, the sheer luxury of not having to be constantly on guard making the hours seem as stretched-out and sweet as molasses. Those were still potent memories, even now. A droplet of water snaking down a shot glass, the slap of cards on the table, the exact cadence of Morita’s voice as he wryly called someone “ace”. Little things.

 

This was just such a night.

 

The Guardians were holed up at a bar on Knowhere. Rocket had milked that name for days while Bucky tried to get any information at all about their destination out of him (“Where are we going?” “Knowhere.” “No, seriously, where is it?” “Knowhere, I told you.” “So we’re not going anywhere.” “We’re taking a trip inside the mind.”), until he’d finally taken pity on Bucky and called him up to the bridge to witness their approach to the monumental skull, illuminated from within by a thousand points of light. Bucky had gaped, then reached down to playfully dope-slap Rocket on the back of the head as all the puns of the past few days fell into place.

 

He’d frozen as soon as he realised what he was doing. Touch was fraught enough, knowing what his strength was capable of – but actually _hitting_ a comrade, even in sparring or as a joke? A comrade who happened to be a fraction of his size? Bucky had been disgusted with his own carelessness.

 

Until Rocket, with a casual strength Bucky would not have believed he possessed, had yanked Bucky into reach by his jacket and slapped him upside the head in return. Then he’d gone back to piloting the ship as if nothing had happened, leaving Bucky suddenly uncomfortable for a whole different range of reasons, remembering the brief feel of claws on his scalp, and tangling in his hair.

 

It had been a while since anyone touched him like he wasn’t primed to explode.

 

So now, here they were, in one of the trading city’s livelier districts, hunched over a table into which half the galaxy seemed to have carved or burned their initials, and playing a game. Only this wasn’t exactly poker night with the Howling Commandos.

 

“My space marine throws a grenade into the room where the orcs are, and...” Quill rolled the brilliantly coloured dice, then frowned down at the result. “Shit.”

 

Rocket cackled with laughter. “Ah, man, you are so fucked – you botch the throw, the grenade lands at your feet, roll for damage.”

 

Gamora downed the rest of the drink in her hand and slapped the empty glass onto the table. “In the meantime, I kick Quill’s still-smouldering form out of the way and charge the nearest orc.”

 

“ _Hey!”_

 

Bucky hid a smile at Quill’s reaction and took another sip of the purple concoction in his hand. Alcohol didn’t do much for him after the serum, but whatever was in the alien drink – Quill had assured him it was safe for human consumption, but didn’t specify beyond that – was spreading a pleasant warmth all through his system, even, although it was impossible, down the length of his left arm.

 

“I use one of my injections to heal Quill,” he put in, as Gamora happily slaughtered fictional space orcs. He couldn’t claim to fully understand the game. Oh, the rules were simple enough once he got going, but it still felt strange when he considered that the soldiers next to him could probably walk out that door and go fight _actual_ space orcs. Most of the Commandos had wanted to spend their rare nights off talking about anything but the war.

 

Soldiers were soldiers… but perhaps there was a difference between soldiers and warriors.

 

He found himself liking the game, nevertheless. It was nice to play a healer.

 

“Okay, break time while Drax goes and gets us another round.” Rocket rubbed his hands together.

 

Drax smiled, his grip tightening on the knife he seemed to perpetually hold in one fist. “What are we breaking?”

 

“Nothing, and it’s Rocket’s round,” Quill threw back over his shoulder, then returned his attention to the blue-skinned alien (although, Bucky supposed, everyone on Knowhere was an alien, including him) with the intriguing-looking crest who had sauntered over to chat him up. Gamora caught Bucky’s gaze, jerked her head in Quill’s direction, and rolled her eyes. Bucky grinned.

 

He was catching himself doing that more and more, these days.

 

Rocket grumbled good-naturedly as he headed off towards the bar. Groot – mobile now, though still only about the length of Bucky’s forearm – nudged Bucky and pointed to his character sheet. “I am Groot?”

 

“Hmmm? Yeah, buddy, go ahead.” Bucky handed him the stylus and watched Groot wrestle it into position and begin tapping away, highlighting different stats. He was just starting to piece together what Groot was suggesting when a very familiar voice sounded across the room.

 

The entire team’s attention snapped to the bar, where Rocket was surrounded by about five hulking aliens, each at least a head taller than Bucky. It was Drax who reacted first.

 

“Rocket!” he yelled. “I do not think that man’s mother _was_ a Turidian swamp weasel! The mating process would have been impossible!” Turning to Bucky, he muttered, “And _disgusting,”_ in what, for Drax, passed for an undertone. Back at the bar, the aliens were looming closer to Rocket; their eyes, whether red or yellow or slit-pupiled or multifaceted, all seemed to radiate menace.

 

“ _Krutack,_ ” Quill muttered. Gamora reached for one of the knives on her belt.

 

Bucky waved a hand as he stood. “I got this.”

 

Quill looked doubtful, in a way that wasn’t too flattering, although Bucky could hardly blame him. “You sure?”

 

“You worried about me?” Bucky smiled slyly back over his shoulder.

 

Quill’s stare looked about a thousand years too old for him, and the smile beneath it didn’t reach his eyes.

 

Taking a deep breath, Bucky strolled across the room to where one of the hulking aliens had Rocket’s shirt fisted in his hand. “Hey! We gonna get those drinks any time soon, Rocket, buddy?”

 

Without taking his eyes off the alien, Rocket snarled, “I can _handle_ -” Then he broke off, and blinked. “Wait, what?”

 

“You got a problem, cyborg?” the alien gripping Rocket’s shirt growled.

  
“Me? Oh, no, nothing like that.” Bucky held up his hands and put on his most charming smile. “I was just wondering whether my pal Rocket here was done with you, and could get on with buying his round.” Silently, he was calculating – heights, weights, weapons, how close those weapons were to Rocket, how fast he could get between these behemoths and his teammate.

 

His heart slowed, the fingers of his metal hand twitching, and the world stilled to the clean lines of a sniper’s sights.

 

_Of the Soldier._

 

 _No!_ Bucky bit his lip, hard, and stuck his left hand behind his back, hooking his fingertips into his belt as if to restrain his arm. The Soldier was gone. The Soldier was gone.

 

“Done with _us_?” One of the aliens – about as wide across as it was tall, with overlapping plates of bone like an armadillo – burst into loud guffaws. “That’s good! Funny cyborg! Maybe we should keep him after we kill the rodent, huh, boys?”

 

“Oh.” Bucky’s eyes went wide and liquid. “Oh, you don’t – you don’t know? Oh, cripes, you goons probably think _you’re_ bullying _him_!”

 

The alien’s laughter died away, and the whole group was staring at Bucky now in confusion.

 

Bucky milked the moment, clutching his hair disconsolately and then giving the nearest alien, who seemed to be the ringleader, the biggest, saddest baby blues he could muster. “I’m so, so sorry, pal.”

 

“What are you _talking_ about?” the leader demanded.

 

Bucky threw a theatrical glance at Rocket. “You wanna tell them, or shall I?”

 

Rocket gaped at him for the barest of seconds, and then recovered smoothly, giving the aliens a smile that still showed a substantial amount of fang. “You go ahead, baby boo.”

 

Resolving to hash out the nickname later, Bucky pushed ahead. “You see, Rocket’s species, this is how they feed. Pick a fight, get you all -” he gestured expansively - “up _real_ close. His breath gives out a chemical – it’s undetectable to most devices, but it starts to work right away. Melting tissue. _Liquefying_ organs. It goes at you from the inside out. Hell, by the time you feel it, half your intestines will be soup.” He favoured them with a sad smile. “Get it now? You’re his _prey._ ”

 

Rocket’s smile widened. The whole gang backed up hurriedly.

 

Bucky delivered the final blow. “I’d say you’ve got about twenty minutes left, unless…?”

 

“Unless _what_?” another alien, yellowed and furry and taloned like some kind of demonic Labrador, roared right in his face.

 

“Unless your ship happens to have a med bay that can treat the symptoms, but so few -”

 

They were gone so quickly that Bucky swore he could feel himself tugged forward by the vacuum of their wake.

 

“Heh.” Rocket turned and leaned on the bar. “Poison breath; I’ll have to remember that one.”

 

Bucky sighed and slouched next to him. “I got a lot of experience getting friends of mine outta trouble. Well, one friend. Bit like you, actually.”

 

“How’s that?”

 

“Attitude the size of the Empire State Building.”

 

“I don’t know what that is, but if it’s on Earth, I’m assuming it’s tiny.” Bucky snorted.

 

“Big talk for a guy who’s never even been to Earth. Have you even met any humans apart from Quill and Stark?”

 

“I know you, don’t I?” Rocket scampered up a bar stool, then plonked himself on the counter next to where Bucky was leaning. Bucky stiffened momentarily as a furry arm settled around his shoulders (well, one shoulder, given the size difference; Rocket’s arm could just about loop over Bucky’s flesh shoulder, leaving his hand dangling around the centre of Bucky’s back). He let out a long, deliberate breath. The prickling of his instincts at someone getting this close was not the same as the Soldier’s urge to attack, he reminded himself. Another breath, and the sense of alarm faded completely… and then he could notice that it was actually kind of nice, Rocket’s arm around him. Rocket’s fur was soft where it brushed his cheek, like a cat’s.

 

“Nah, humies are okay,” Rocket was saying. “You don’t got a stick up your ass like Xandarians, and you made it into space with tech made outta rocks and string, I got some respect for that, and you’re kinda cute. Plus, Quill brought us something called pizza one time, and any planet that could invent that...”

 

Bucky let out a soft groan. “ _Pizza._ Lemme tell you, pal, back during the war, we spent some time in Italy – that’s a country on Earth, it’s where pizza comes from. First time I had that, I thought it was the best thing I ever tasted. Hell, but I could go for some of that.” He tilted his head back… and the skin at the nape of his neck brushed, just barely, against the tips of Rocket’s claws.

 

Bucky drew in a breath sharply.

 

 _That_ touch should have read as a threat, even if only for a second. It didn’t. It sent a current down Bucky’s spine, through all the nerve endings that were of no use to a living weapon, and so had lain rusted and forgotten since he fell into Hydra’s arms.

 

Rocket’s fingers withdrew, just as something else he’d said clicked in Bucky’s mind. He glanced at Rocket, who wasn’t looking at him. Instead, he was gazing back in the general direction of their table.

 

Bucky felt an odd lurch in his stomach.

 

“Does Quill know you think he’s ‘kinda cute’?” he asked, trying to sound offhand and succeeding in making his voice sound like a long-rusted door rasping open.

 

Rocket startled. Bucky had turned his face away, but he could _feel_ it, the comfortable weight on his shoulder jerk and resettle.

 

“ _Quill?_ Oh, krutack me, you gotta be kidding. No, I wasn’t thinking about Quill, I -”

 

The end of the sentence was abruptly choked off, and Bucky did turn to look, at that. Rocket had one paw buried in the fur at the nape of his neck, and he was glancing around the room wildly, everywhere but at Bucky.

 

Just then, the bartender set their drinks on the counter. Rocket shot him a grin that looked, to Bucky’s eye, more than a little relieved. Apparently, the bartender didn’t agree – probably something to do with the amount of fang Rocket was flashing – because he scurried off, presumably out of range of the terrifying alien’s poison breath.

 

Bucky trailed behind as they made their way back to the table, his arms full of glasses. Back to fictional space orcs. And the faint aftershocks of something he wasn’t ready to think about, not yet.


	4. Come Equipped With A Gun

Actual space orcs weren’t long in coming. By Bucky’s reckoning, not nearly long enough.

 

Shaking and drenched in sweat, he leaned against the bulkhead, alien blood drying on his clothes. It smelled faintly sweet, and that made it worse. Bucky began to feel sick.

 

Then he tried to move, to pull himself away from the wall, and the vague sickness sharpened into a wave of cold nausea. His shoulder practically shrieked in pain.

 

Bucky’s left arm was all metal and circuits, the nerve endings where it locked into his shoulder long ago cauterized – but the arm was still connected to his body. If something hit it, he would feel the vibrations running up through his shoulder. And if, as had just happened in this battle, something wrenched it half out of its socket, his shoulder would bear both the impact and the entire dead weight of the arm, now suspended on only a few of the connection circuits.

 

At least the injury had come late in the battle. He’d managed to hang on through sheer adrenaline and the pain-dampening properties of the serum until he dispatched his last opponent, Gamora, at his side, slicing through another two and sending the rest screaming back to their ship. Then Rocket had blown the explosives and they’d streaked out of the enemy base, barely ahead of the blast. And only then had Bucky let himself feel it.

 

“Barnes.” Bucky stumbled, forced himself to straighten, bracing against the wall. On instinct, he turned so that his damaged arm was a little better concealed as Gamora strode up behind him. “You did well out there.”

 

A little dizzy with the pain and the stench of death, Bucky tried to smile. He knew a compliment from the most dangerous woman in the galaxy was a rare thing, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to simply thank her. “Well, you know. That’s what they built me for.”

 

He was startled to feel a cool hand settle on his uninjured shoulder. Gamora’s face was grave, and almost sad. “But _you_ decide how to use it.” Before Bucky could reply, though, her sharp eyes spotted his injury, and widened. “ _Krutack._ ROCKET!”

 

“ _What?”_ came the shout from the cockpit.

 

“No, don’t -”

 

“BARNES IS WOUNDED!” Gamora yelled back, cutting a dangerous glare at Bucky. He pulled back from her touch on his shoulder, and she bared her teeth.

 

“It’s nothing, it’s the arm, it’s not _me,_ I can fix it myself,” Bucky was insisting when Rocket turned up, took one look at his damaged appendage, and smacked him on the thigh, which was enough to jolt Bucky into shutting up. He _assumed_ that it was a substitute for hitting him in the shoulder if Rocket were taller, but that – that was still claws a little closer to some important areas than he typically liked.

 

Or possibly not close enough. Bucky’s feelings on the matter of Rocket and his touch had been somewhat muddled, lately.

 

“You humies, I gotta do everything myself...” Rocket rolled his eyes, but there was something tense in his voice. “Workshop. Now. C’mon.”

 

Bucky pressed his back into the wall and dug in his heels, fighting down the nausea. “Really, if you lend me the tools I can do it myself. I’ve been repairing it since I got away from Hydra, I don’t need -” Oh, Christ, there were going to be hands on him, hands on the arm, rewiring it, rewiring _him_ and he couldn’t stop them, and the part of his brain that was back in _that chair_ was screaming –

 

Gamora’s expression softened a bit, watching him. Then she squared her jaw. “You must let us tend -”

 

“Okay.”

 

Bucky managed to crane his neck downward without being sick, though it was a near thing. Rocket was fiddling with some mechanism taken from an inner pocket. He spoke casually, as if he were barely registering Bucky’s presence at all, but Bucky suspected he was being watched keenly from the corner of Rocket’s eye.

 

“Okay?” Bucky repeated.

 

“You come back to the workshop, I’ve got everything you need. You wanna fix yourself up, you can. You don’t want me to watch, I won’t.”

 

Bucky gritted his teeth.

 

“Okay.”

 

***

 

 

In the end, Bucky needed to lean heavily on Gamora to make it to Rocket’s workshop. He apologised, knowing that his own bulk and the metal arm combined couldn’t be an easy weight to carry, but she raised an eyebrow, wrapped his good arm around her neck and hers around his waist, and steered him through the corridors as if he’d weighed no more than a balloon. All three of them were silent as they went, but Gamora and Rocket seemed to be having a silent conversation of some intensity, given the way she kept shooting him challenging looks and he kept staring her down. Bucky wasn’t sure how it concluded, but after Gamora helped him into a chair in the workshop, she disappeared.

 

Rocket jumped up on a stool and reached for something that looked like a club. Bucky flinched, but Rocket merely took it down from its rack and placed it on the table in front of him. “Sladon,” he said, then started laying out tools next to it. “Quantum spanner, drogeen -”

 

“Don’t you got a pair of pliers in this joint?” Bucky asked desperately.

 

Rocket’s eyes met his, and while Rocket’s demeanour was cool and careful, those eyes were most definitely… not. It looked like something in Rocket was close to breaking, and Bucky didn’t understand it. “I think Stark left some Earth tools around. Hang in there.”

 

Bucky slumped back in his chair, panting heavily, as Rocket tore into cabinets, tossing wires and scraps of metal in all directions. If he tried, he could position his half-detached arm in such a way that the weight of it was no longer pulling on the wires, which took the edge off the pain, but his shoulder still throbbed around that seam of flesh and metal – too mechanical for his healing factor to fix, too organic not to hurt. It was such a glaring fault in the way he’d been cut up and stitched together, and all the worse because he knew Hydra didn’t think of it as a fault. Who cared if a weapon felt pain?

 

“Fucking _useless_ piece of hardware,” he hissed under his breath, unsure whether he was just talking about the arm.

 

Rocket was scampering back over with a toolbox in his arms. It looked reassuringly blocky and analogue against the sleek designs and alien glyphs surrounding him. At hearing Bucky’s voice, though, he faltered, just for a second. Then he set the box on the table and opened it. “These better?”

 

“Yeah.” Bucky tried a smile. He didn’t like to think about what it probably looked like on his grey face. “Thanks.”

 

“You know what you’re doing from here?”

 

“More or less.” He reached for a wrench, holding it in his shaking hand for a moment as he surveyed the arm, looking for a plan of attack. “I mean, the bastards who gave me this didn’t exactly leave me a set of instructions, you know? Had to figure most of it out for myself. I think I can get it back in, at least.” He hoped that came out sounding more confident than he felt. The connectors were damaged beyond what he’d seen before, beyond what should have been _possible_ without the arm being ripped right off. This was going to be fiddly work, and the fog settling over his mind wasn’t helping.

 

“And as long as you can fix it yourself, you don’t gotta let anyone have that control over you. Not again.”

 

Bucky looked up, startled by the rough, guttural voice, sounding almost like Rocket was the one in pain. But rather than explain what he meant, Rocket did something even more baffling.

 

He unhooked his uniform jacket, and turned around.

 

A soft hiss of sympathy escaped Bucky when he saw the metal studded into Rocket’s back. Rocket looked sidelong at him over his shoulder, and shrugged the jacket back on.

 

Bucky swallowed, started to speak, stopped.

 

Then he held out the wrench.

 

When Rocket shot him a questioning look, Bucky gazed back at him steadily. “Will you do it?”

 

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

 

“Sorry.” Bucky felt his throat closing up. _Way to fuck it up, Barnes. He probably just about respected you for wanting to do it yourself._ “I thought -”

 

“You think I’m going to go at your arm with that piece of krutacking junk?” Rocket hopped up on the table, brushed the wrench aside – though more gently than he might have – and picked up one of his own tools. “Humies. It’s a miracle you ever developed the technology to get off that rock to begin with.”

 

“Yeah, yeah, says the guy who makes bombs out of spare parts,” Bucky told him, partly as a way of distracting himself. He couldn’t feel Rocket’s touch on the arm – too light – but he jolted when a connector sparked back to life.

 

“See, you said that like it was an insult, but all I heard was _Rocket is a genius._ ”

 

“Punk,” Bucky murmured warmly, surprising himself.

 

With astonishing speed, connector after connector snapped back into place, punctuated by Rocket sculpting the metal of his arm back into place. His tools were nothing like the tools the Hydra scientists used to use – no showers of sparks, no heat, only a brief light and then a sense of _rightness,_ the weight and reach and sensitivity returning to normal. When the last coupling reconnected, Bucky let out a long, shaky breath, and only then noticed that his cheeks were wet out of sheer relief. Scrubbing at his face with the heel of his hand, he muttered, “Shit, sorry -”

 

Once again, there were claws on his skin. This time, they lingered.

 

Bucky tilted his head back, pushing into Rocket’s grip, and let those clever fingers scritch his scalp and pet the long sweep of his hair. He kept his eyes closed, as if to meet Rocket’s eyes might be too much – but the itch to pull away, to lock down, was absent. Instead, it felt as though he might fall apart, as if his skin might burst and the thousand conflicting things inside come pouring out. But if he did, those hands were going to hold him, those skilled and absurdly strong ( _cybernetic – like me_ ) hands. Hands that could restrain him, if they had to, however they had to.

 

For the first time, Bucky felt as though if he broke, he wouldn’t break anyone else in the process.

 

Rocket finished off with a none-too-gentle tousle of Bucky’s hair, and Bucky could feel him move away.

 

“Hey, thanks,” Bucky said, slitting his eyes open. “For the repair.” The qualification was suspiciously quick, perhaps, so he paired it with his laziest, most charming smile, and stretched, glorying in the feeling of the arm back in its proper place, the last of the pain fading. “I realise it’s gotta be a pain for you to work on a piece of ugly old Earth tech like me.”

 

Rocket, who had his back turned to Bucky and was putting his tools away with an exaggerated care, didn’t laugh. Instead, he tripled-checked the position of the quantum spanner, and then said, “Yeah, that arm’s not exactly cutting edge, out here. Rest of you is pretty easy on the eyes, though.”

 

Bucky blinked. Rocket’s back was rigid.

 

_Well. Only one way to find out._

 

“You flirting with me, sailor?” Bucky drawled, batting his eyelashes.

 

Rocket’s tail flicked restlessly as he turned around. “Depends. How do you feel about adorable woodland creatures?” He was smiling, after a fashion, but there was something challenging in his eyes.

 

“I’ll let you know if I see any,” Bucky shot back. “Foul-mouthed geniuses who fight dirty, though, I reckon I like those just fine.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

And then Rocket was in his lap.

 

Bucky hadn’t known what to expect. A kiss? Was that even going to work? For the moment, though, Rocket wasn’t trying to kiss him. His arms wove around Bucky, and Bucky held him, delicately at first, then tightening his grip. He could feel soft fur brushing over his cheek, nuzzling insistently. _Scent-marking me,_ he realised with a sudden thrill – and then claws found the back of his neck, and Bucky lost all capacity for thought.


	5. Epilogue - To Help With Good Rocky's Revival

_Now_

 

 

They didn’t stay in the workshop long, that afternoon. Bucky was still shaken, stinking of someone else’s blood, and Rocket was as careful with him as with one of the _Milano’s_ precious components. But the offer of a drink and a night on the town at the next port – breathlessly made, and just as eagerly accepted – was enough to convince Bucky that perhaps _some_ things were the same in space as they’d been in Brooklyn, three-quarters of a century ago, and alien species or not, maybe he wasn’t as out of his depth as he feared. Maybe he could do this.

 

On the evening in question, he shaved carefully, splashed on a little aftershave from a bottle Quill had lent him (the scent was unpleasantly lugubrious, but apparently “guaranteed to make you irresistible to just about every species this side of the galactic rim, and believe me, I’ve tested it”), and pulled his too-long hair back as best he could. A few strands escaped to trail over his forehead, and Bucky sighed. It was ridiculous, he realised; Rocket wasn’t a girl he was taking to a USO dance (or, as had just as often been the case, a fellow soldier he was hoping might be willing to slip out the back with him at the end of the night). He wasn’t even the same _species_ as Bucky. The odds that he was going to have any kind of view on the style of Bucky’s hair were slim to none.

 

It was just… he’d grown accustomed to disregarding mirrors, except to check the details of a disguise. Sometimes his handlers told him to shave, sometimes they didn’t bother. Sometimes they cut his hair, helped him blend in. Sometimes not. While he’d been on the run, it had been the same – make sure the hat was shading his face or that he didn’t look too much like the most recent wanted poster. It was _satisfying_ to take his time in front of the mirror, to watch Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes emerging slowly from under scruff and foam.

 

Well. Whether Rocket gave a damn about his hair, Bucky wanted to make the effort.

 

Apparently, he wasn’t the only one, because when Rocket joined him in the shuttle, his usual uniform was nowhere to be found. Instead, he was dressed in a slim-cut black vest Bucky hadn’t seen before, and – even more impressively – toting only a fraction of his usual cache of weaponry. Bucky found himself oddly warmed by the gesture.

 

He was significantly less happy about the lack of weapons about thirty minutes later, when Rocket’s sensitive hearing chanced to pick up a conversation in a bar, which led to them abandoning their drinks and trailing a man pushing a suspicious-looking crate down to the space station’s docking bay, which led to Rocket sneaking onboard what turned out to be a people-traffickers’ shuttle to disable it while Bucky freed the children – _children!_ \- in the crate, which led to all hell breaking loose.

 

Which was how the two of them ended up alone, sheltering behind still-smouldering wreckage with half a dozen enraged traffickers, now stranded without their shuttle, bearing down on them.

 

“I hate your date ideas,” Bucky murmured.

 

“Well what did you want us to do on a date, just drink and make out and _not_ shoot people?”

 

Bucky glanced up into a laughing pair of dark brown eyes, made a noise like _auuugggghhh_ that he couldn’t remember coming out of his throat since the days he’d fought alongside Steve, and surged to his feet.

 

The firefight was over in seconds. Bucky kept his head down, out of Rocket’s way, and made each shot count – this trafficker’s forehead, that one’s throat, the writhing centre of the mass of tentacles that made up this other one. Perched on his shoulder, Rocket was a loud, gleeful scattershot machine, sending bolts of energy in every direction. When the last trafficker finally dropped, so did Bucky, slumping to the ground to catch his breath. Rocket tumbled off his perch and rolled, coming to rest up against Bucky’s side, his little chest heaving.

 

_Fire and the stench of blood and the still-hot gun lying next to you, the spray of blood from ruptured bodies, you did that –_

 

Rocket, warm and steady and real, under his arm.

 

“You smell like burning,” Bucky said, after a long time.

 

Rocket made a face. “ _You_ smell like _Quill’s aftershave._ Think you’re getting the better deal, here.”

 

Bucky couldn’t help it. He started to laugh, and then, when Rocket began to snigger next to him, lost it completely, until they were both howling in each other’s arms.

 

Arms that, artificial or not, were strong around each other.

**Author's Note:**

> Fic and chapter titles - much like the original concept for Rocket Raccoon himself, back in the day! - are taken from the Beatles' "Rocky Raccoon".


End file.
